


The Next Time Around

by hakura0



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 03:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9859850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hakura0/pseuds/hakura0
Summary: This is the next time around.





	

"Goodnight," your mother tells you as she tucks you in, and you look up at her expectantly.

You are all of three, tired and struggling to stay awake, and you remember something else. She smiles, and kisses you on the forehead before turning out the lights.

You sleep, and there are pictures to go with the memories. You wake up crying and afraid and your mother comes in to try to calm you down, but you can't explain what you saw. You just hold on tight instead.

You start to forget, as you get older, but you tell your mother stories anyway. She humors you, and tells her friends about how great your imagination is. 

You're drafted, eventually - everything from before long forgotten, worn away by education and the now. Your mother frets and you wave away her concerns. 

The world is at war for the second time and you want to do your part. You excel throughout training, even though your sleep is uneasy. You never remember your dreams in the morning any more.

You freeze in your first real battle; the second. It's the third time that kills you, and all you can think is that you don't want to die like this again.

It isn't until, vision fading, you catch the eyes of another man that you understand. You haven't seen him before, but at the same time you know that you have.

You open your mouth to speak but his name dies on your lips, just missing your final breath that could have carried it.

(You wake up behind enemy lines, alone as far as you can tell until you're not. Someone is in front of you suddenly and you laugh through broken and bruised ribs at the man in front of you. It isn't till after that you realize his arm is bleeding, that there is panic in his eyes that abates when he realizes that you're conscious.

"Your arm," you start to say, and he shakes his head but you manage to sit up, to stand. Your head is spinning like a top, but you help him clean and bandage it and you both stay as damn silent as you can.

An owl cries overhead and it means nothing to you. You fight to pull a name back to your lips but you can't find it, and you get the feeling that he might be feeling the same way. 

He hands you a gun after a split ration of dinner and you don't tell him that he might as well keep it. He has his own.

Eventually you both learn names, bits and pieces of your lives and it all somehow feels less-or-more than real. You aren't sure which.

Your going is slow and painful and your friend goes down out of almost nowhere to a shot in the leg, and you can see movement from the right direction, raise your gun as your heart beats on and fire straight and true until your ammunition is gone.

You bandage him, do what you can, and the two of you keep going, not sure where, but to some almost unfathomable away.

You're deserting, and you know that, but you're already a coward according to everyone else who's fought with you.

You have awkward painful sex a few more weeks in, in some little town, neither of you really healed and neither of you really caring. He jokes about retirement, and you do odd jobs while he takes up wood carving. 

You can't help to notice how comfortable he is with a knife.

Eventually, the both of you graduate to furniture, make a living. There is always something at the tip of your mind, your tongue, but you grow used to it and then it doesn't matter. 

You both die almost a century later, still in that little place, still all but undiscovered. They say nothing about the fact that they find you in the same bed like they have said nothing all this time.

They just bury you together again.


End file.
